


Love and Kindness

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: Black Sails Works [3]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, F/M, PWP, Post-Series, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 07:07:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11527113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “This is insulting,” John complains, as Madi fastens the shackles around his wrists, looping a chain through to the hook in the bulwark above his bed.  “I’m not rabid.”(Or: the inevitable sex-pollen AU.)





	Love and Kindness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marmolita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita/gifts).



> I think this is the dirtiest thing I've ever written? I just wanted to put that out there, lest I scandalize longtime listeners.
> 
> (Also, this is technically dubcon if you consider the fact that John is under the influence of an unknown drug.)

John Silver will not leave her island, so Madi’s mother puts him to work, doing what he knows best: raiding ships, and bringing the profits home. His crew are all Madi’s men, so there is no need for her to come along and make sure the money comes back. She comes with him anyway, which she knows John takes to be a sign of her journey towards forgiveness.

It is not.

She watches him carefully—not because he was her lover, or because she misses his warm, familiar body, or his bright gaze focused on her, or the way soft tendrils of his hair are always falling into his eyes—but because she wants to make him obsolete. When she is certain that she knows everything he knows about hunting ships and taking them, she will ask him again to leave, and there will be no reason for him to stay.

Madi is aboard the _Lightning_ the day John takes a little French frigate containing a powdered courtesan who weeps and wails over the loss of her fripperies as though they were her children. Madi looks at the woman in disgust while John rifles dispassionately through her things.

His fingers land on a little jeweled vial, and the woman’s tone changes. “Don’t touch that,” the courtesan says sharply, and Madi takes a reflexive step forward—but it is too late. The vial is already open in John’s hands, a strange vapor drifting out, and he sucks in a startled lungful of it.  
  
*  
  
It is not a poison, the courtesan explains, weeping again under Madi’s hard gaze, Musa’s knife pressed to the woman’s chin. Or it is a poison, but only in the usual way of rum or opium—it wears off in a matter of hours.  
  
“What is it _for_ ,” Madi demands. John is pale, but doesn’t look harmed—but this may not mean anything. There are poisons that take days to come into full effect.  
  
A panicked string of French emerges from the woman, and Ayodele laughs.  
  
“What did she say?” Madi asks.

“It is a drug,” Ayodele translates, grinning, “meant for pleasure. An aphrodisiac.” All of the men are laughing now—even John is chuckling—but the woman still looks terrified.  
  
“Too much,” she tells Madi, casting a fearful look at John. “That was—far too much.”  
  
Madi gives her a cool nod, and orders the crew to resume sacking the frigate. They will leave the survivors alive, if penniless. When they return to the _Lightning_ , she orders Ayodele to the helm, and John locked in his cabin.  
  
There is some muffled laughter, but as always she is obeyed.  

*

“This is insulting,” John complains, as Madi fastens the shackles around his wrists, looping a chain through to the hook in the bulwark above his bed. “I’m not _rabid_.”

“She said to take precautions,” she says shortly, testing the length to make sure the range of motion in his arms is enough for—what he may need, but not so much that he can get free. She is uncomfortably aware that she has not touched him in months, and now she is kneeling over him in his bed. “I am.”

John laughs, close and incredulous. “Under the circumstances,” he says, raising both eyebrows, “a kind woman might understand ‘precautions’ to mean a jar of oil and a flask of water."  

“How unfortunate for you,” Madi says, smarting a little as she rises from the bed, “to have found an unkind woman.”  
  
John sighs. “I didn’t mean that,” he says, and he might claim to be unaffected, but she knows the flush in his cheeks, the way he keeps absently catching his lower lip with his teeth. “What I mean is—you can trust me.”  
  
Madi lets the silence speak for her.  
  
“With _this_ ,” John says harshly, breaking their eye contact, the flush deepening, spreading down his neck. “You can trust me this far, for fuck’s sake. I’d never hurt you.”  
  
She doesn’t believe he would. But she doesn’t know this drug, either. She gets up, ignores his quiet curse, and leaves the cabin. She comes back a few minutes later, with a jar of oil and a flask of water. In just that time, he has worsened—his eyes are blown so dark she can barely see the blue, and he is slowly flexing and relaxing his hands in their shackles. She wants, with the old dull ache, to touch him.

“Madi,” he says seriously, as she approaches the bed, dropping both the oil and the water within his reach. “Tell me you _know_ I’d never hurt you. I’d never touch you, if you didn’t want it.”  
  
Madi looks down at her arm where John has grabbed her, apparently without noticing. His fingers are hot, his thumb digging into the soft skin of her inner arm. She looks back at John, and he swallows. He slowly lets her go, uncurling one finger at a time.  
  
“Madi,” he whispers, looking uneasy for the first time. Almost frightened. Her throat and chest tighten briefly, ribs and throat closing in on her.  
  
“I’ll come back in a few hours,” Madi tells him, and gets out.

*  
  
She reminds herself that it’s natural to miss him. Her body can miss John’s hands, his smiling mouth, his strong thighs, and it only means she wants him. Her body does not care that John betrayed her. It only remembers that John’s body is its friend.  
  
The men are full of laughter and ribald jokes. She leaves them to it, and tends to the ledgers for as long as she can stomach, trying not to think of what John is doing mere feet away, on the other side of the bulwark.  
  
*  
  
She comes back to his cabin three hours later, armed with more water, and is honestly shocked by what she finds.

John is curled on his side, boots and trousers discarded, his face almost scarlet. He’s moaning, low and miserable, his hand working frantically at his cock, which is an angry red, arched over his belly. She observes, distantly, that he’s sweating through his shirt; his hair is sticking to his forehead and the rest of him is slick with it. He looks like he’s _dying_ , hunched over himself and unable to stop his hips jerking hopelessly into his own hand, and she must not be a kind woman, because the sight goes straight to her gut, and she has to wet her mouth before she can speak.  
  
“John?” she asks after a moment, and he looks up at her, face twisted with humiliation. He doesn’t stop touching himself.  
  
“Can’t,” he says, then gulps for air. “Can’t, Madi, I can’t.”  
  
She takes an unwilling step closer. He shudders. “What?” she asks, amazed that her voice comes out as calm as it does. “You can’t what?”  
  
He stares at her blankly, and she realizes with a lurch that his belly is glistening with sweat and oil, but nothing else. “You can’t come,” she realizes out loud, and John groans.  
  
“Knock me out,” he says when he gets his breath back. “ _Please_ , fuck. I can’t take another hour of this,” he says, hips still restlessly twitching into his hand. “Don’t leave me here.”  
  
She can’t think. She could call someone else—she could ask Musa to come and hit John over the head, she could ask Kia if opium would help, she could. Do something. “John,” she says before she’s made up her mind, and he looks at her with his mouth open, silently gasping.  
  
“Don’t leave,” he says again, fast. “Hit me, my head, there’s—a pistol-butt, anything, _please_.”

“I’m not going to leave,” she says, and has to wet her mouth again. “I’m going to give you a choice. Do you understand?”  
  
He nods, chest heaving. His hand stills on his cock, trembling a little with the effort.  
  
“I could knock you out,” she says clearly, meeting his eyes, “or I could help you. It won’t change anything,” she adds quickly, when his breath hitches. “It would be just this.”  
  
Something like a smile, but terrible, crosses over his mouth. “When have I—ever—not chosen you?” he asks.  
  
She hesitates. “It could hurt,” she says, not entirely sure what she means. It already looks like it hurts.  
  
“I want you,” he says, and adds, too-honest: “I always want you.”  
  
Madi nods. She swallows hard, and slides down the bar over the door. She shrugs off her jacket, and John swears. She kneels down to take off her shoes, and then unbuckles her trousers, and he says her name, urgent.  
  
“My hands,” he says when she looks up. “You have to shorten the chain, you have to—you don’t trust me,” he says with a grimace that’s meant to be a grin, and the man who broke her heart shouldn’t be able to make her ache like this.  
  
She pads up to the bed on bare feet, shirt hanging loose around her like a shift. He stares at her like he’s starving. She kneels on the bed beside him and his breath quickens, his cock twitches against his belly, but his hands don’t move as she reaches for the chain and shortens it, pulling until his arms are stretched flat over his head. He mouths her name silently, over and over, his eyes dark and enormous, his lips bitten raw. When the chain is secure, she fits herself onto the bed beside him and reaches for his cock. It takes barely half a stroke before he’s coming, shaking with relief—but he stays hard in her hand.  
  
She gives him an experimental stroke, and he jerks into her touch, even though he’s usually too sensitive at this point. She can’t imagine what that’s like, satisfaction and frustration all at once. “Oh god,” he says, sounding terrified.

“It’s all right,” she tells him, although nothing about this is all right. She feels dizzy with lust and dread. This will _hurt_ , she thinks, but her dumb heart and her dumb body both ache, both can’t help but want. “I have you.”  
  
“You do,” he says desperately, hips rolling into her hand, the expression on his face shaken and devout. “You have--every shred of me, as long as I’m breathing.” She has to stroke him into another orgasm before he’ll stop talking, and when _that_ doesn’t satisfy him and he stays stubbornly hard in her hand he breaks down and weeps.  
  
She gets on top of him, then, wanting him and sick with worry for him all at once, and tries to gentle him through it, but he braces his foot against the bed and clutches the chain and fucks up into her like he’s dying, like she’s the only thing tethering him to the damned world. And there is something infectious about that kind of lust, that wounded hunger, because she finds herself almost as desperate as he is, boosting his right thigh against her hip to help him find leverage, grinding down against him until the breath goes out of her. 

She shudders over him, a small sweet orgasm rippling through her, and he bucks under her. The sweetness must knock something loose in her chest because she finds herself fumbling with the chain. She doesn’t unshackle him but she does work it loose from the hook.  
  
“ _Don’t_ ,” he says raggedly, but his arms come around her and the chain slides cold down her back, the shackles dig into the skin of her neck as he clutches her head in his hands. He strokes her ear with his thumb and she shivers, and he drags her down to kiss him, and her traitor’s heart skips a beat.  
  
“I love you,” he whispers into her mouth, his face still wet with frustrated tears, and she tries to kiss him quiet but he keeps saying it, his fingers digging into her shoulders and his beard scraping against her neck and his teeth in her jaw, saying it in every way they both know how, and each time it hurts to hear. Orgasm rolls over her again, sweet and sick, and he follows her with a frightened gasp into the aftershocks.

He sobs into her neck, and she kisses his forehead, his damp hair, the shell of his ear, smooths her hands over his ribs. She can feel him finally softening inside her. “I miss you,” she murmurs, without meaning to.  
  
“Then _forgive me_ ,” he says, like the words are being torn out of him.  
  
She can’t. She knows, in the same bone-deep way she knows she loves him, that she never will. “John,” she says softly, and tilts his head up until she can kiss him exactly the way her heart wants her to, searching and unsated. He kisses her back, and when she draws away he looks up at her with barely guarded hope.

“Don’t you know a goodbye when you hear one?” she asks, as kind as she knows how.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm wildehacked on tumblr if you want to come say hi. :) All feedback is loved.


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